UHD Review A Few Words About A few words about...™ - The Apu Trilogy -- in 4k UHD (1 Viewer)

[Robert Harris]

Which is a shame. There are many worthy Indian films that are not Western style art house cinema and not part of a Western critics canon but deserve proper restoration and presentation. What is available from Indian commercial sources is usually digitally overprocessed remasterings of classic films or nothing in HD resolution. For starters Criterion could release the restored "Pyaasa" without the watermark of the Indian release. And have a proper go at "Mughal-E-Azam" whose Indian "restoration" is atrocious. And please, restore "Umrao Jaan".

These sound like a job for the team behind Out of the Blue. Probably budget around 3.2 million, with proper clean-up and other niceties. Possibly Kickstarter to handle the basics.

 

[madfloyd]

Film doesn't involve pixels and it can resolve much finer detail and RGB resolutions than even 4K digital. Some have argued that to fully capture the full resolution of film you would need 8K. Mind you, for many films, this is possible with 4K. I'm no expert, but that is the way I see it.

Well in this case, that is not the reason (it was explained above). And while I'm sure it's possible that 8k would be required to do justice to certain films, I sincerely doubt it would be typical as many 4k releases don't improve on 2k versions as there simply isn't any more information to be captured. Mr. Harris often mentions this.

 

[jayembee]

Which is a shame. There are many worthy Indian films that are not Western style art house cinema and not part of a Western critics canon but deserve proper restoration and presentation. What is available from Indian commercial sources is usually digitally overprocessed remasterings of classic films or nothing in HD resolution. For starters Criterion could release the restored "Pyaasa" without the watermark of the Indian release. And have a proper go at "Mughal-E-Azam" whose Indian "restoration" is atrocious. And please, restore "Umrao Jaan".

Back about 10 years ago I was bingeing a bunch of films on Netflix. I kept a log of what I watched with the rating I gave each one. A lot of them were foreign films of one sort or another. Looking at the list, I realize I don't remember a lot of them, even ones I rated highly. Sigh.

Anyway, the Indian ones I watched were:

Bombay Summer (Joseph Mathew, 2009 [US co-production]
Road, Movie (Dev Benegal, 2009)
Udaan (Vikramaditya Motwane, 2010)
Peepli [Live] (Anusha Rizvi & Mahmood Farooqui, 2010)
Madras Café (Shoojit Sircar, 2013)

I rated all of them "4" (out of 5), except the last, which I rated "3".

The one I remember the best was technically a Canadian film by Deepa Mehta, Water (2005), which I also rated "4".

 

[Martin_Teller]

They could certainly do more Ritwak Ghatak and Mrinal Sen.

 

[Chuck_Kahn]

Film doesn't involve pixels and it can resolve much finer detail and RGB resolutions than even 4K digital. Some have argued that to fully capture the full resolution of film you would need 8K. Mind you, for many films, this is possible with 4K. I'm no expert, but that is the way I see it.

There are so many variables that can mar a film presentation - generation loss (camera negative->interpositive->dupe negative->projection print), wear and damage to the print, poorly maintained and operated film projectors (bad focus or dim bulbs), lack of ambient light control in the theater - that a 4K Criterion viewed on an OLED sounds like the safer bet - one that bypasses all the hurdles of film presentation and gets our eyeballs closer to experiencing the surviving elements.

American Zoetrope archivist James Mockoski maintained that on Apocalypse Now the "4K scan, combined with Dolby’s HDR processing (Dolby Vision), has led to a level of depth and detail in Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography that you couldn’t see before." The science of scanning has improved so much in the past 15 years that even though 4K isn't theoretically up to 35mm resolution (of the camera negative), it has been delivering a more consistent high quality result to a lot more screens than traditional film methods could. The Outsiders 4K has a featurette where Mockoski describes how rebuilding the films opticals in 4K bypasses the generation loss inherent in analog and brings the viewer closer to the DOP's intent.

 

[Robert Harris]

There are so many variables that can mar a film presentation - generation loss (camera negative->interpositive->dupe negative->projection print), wear and damage to the print, poorly maintained and operated film projectors (bad focus or dim bulbs), lack of ambient light control in the theater - that a 4K Criterion viewed on an OLED sounds like the safer bet - one that bypasses all the hurdles of film presentation and gets our eyeballs closer to experiencing the surviving elements.

American Zoetrope archivist James Mockoski maintained that on Apocalypse Now the "4K scan, combined with Dolby’s HDR processing (Dolby Vision), has led to a level of depth and detail in Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography that you couldn’t see before." The science of scanning has improved so much in the past 15 years that even though 4K isn't theoretically up to 35mm resolution (of the camera negative), it has been delivering a more consistent high quality result to a lot more screens than traditional film methods could. The Outsiders 4K has a featurette where Mockoski describes how rebuilding the films opticals in 4K bypasses the generation loss inherent in analog and brings the viewer closer to the DOP's intent.

Re-building the opticals in GF3, which were quite soft, was a major attribute of both restorations. We didn’t have the budget to replace all but the most problematic in 2007, but they were swapped out (tech term) for the 2021.